Hibi by Masahisa Fukase

Hibi literally comprises a series of street photographs by renowned Japanese photographer Masahisa Fukase. Each of the black and white images painstakingly attend to the roads surface the worn road-markings, the fading lines and arrows eroded by the citys innumerable inhabitants, a web of fissures in the asphalt. In 1992, Fukase printed and painted the works for a solo exhibition, ’Private Scenes 92’, held at Nikon Salon in Tokyo. He overlaid a set of bromide prints with fluid drawings in brightly coloured inks and on every image the physical presence of the artist is traced, a shadow-presence which seems to offer a reading, an interpretation but one that can never be fully resolved. Masahisa Fukase was born in the town of Bifuka in Nakagawa District, Hokkaido, in 1934. He graduated from the Nihon University College of Arts Photography Department in 1956. Fukase became a freelance photographer in 1968 after working at the Nippon Design Center and Kawade Shobo Shinsha Publishers. Swiss-bound hardcover 240 pa